News Update: Squashing bugs and other nerdy stuff

So this week has been a pretty exciting one for build stuff, and we wanted to make a news update detailing the various tribulations and discoveries we made. One of the biggest issues we had with our builds was due to UI scaling, which in layman's terms is just the buttons you see on a scene. Since we had built our environments mostly using UI rather than Scene environments, any time the UI scaled to fit different resolutions all those buttons would move to fit the screen. This type of scaling makes perfect sense for things like the text box and actual characters in scenes, but it makes no sense for clickables in the environment since it would never look right. So we spent some time trying to figure out the right way to fix this issue.

(this bug will never happen again!)

The end result of our research led us to realize that to make the environments how we pictured we'd have to retool all existing rooms and areas throughout the build. This is a bit of a massive undertaking, however the benefits of doing so are a bit absurd. Essentially by locking the game into a UI environment that prevented us from changing certain types of effects and objects in scenes, so now we'd be able to do some pretty wild stuff. A great example of this is our brand new Live Menu which currently is using a placeholder, but it's a proper moving object with a space background with moving stars and space dust. The effect is even greater since we'll be able to add actual particle effects and animations into the backgrounds, which is something we've wanted to do from the very beginning. Luckily with these changes we don't actually have to change any dialogue or rewrite any scenes massively, but rather connect everything we already have properly. This will still take some time but we're aiming for everything to be done before the end of the month.

(we'll have a proper spaceship soon but progress!)

Pretty much every single room and area is going to have to be changed into proper Unity scenes. The good thing is because all the assets were saved correctly importing them into the environments is significantly easier than having to go through that whole process again. We can pretty much use everything we already have without having to redo it, and we're super happy that's possible because of the time it saves. Due to these changes we're gonna have to take a little bit longer to let patrons try out the new stuff, but we think you're gonna be really happy with what you're gonna see. Also we got our brand new menu track that we're extremely excited to let you guys listen to. There are more sound effects and other fun things that we'll be adding, but for now we just wanted to give you a picture of where things are at.

(every current room and area turned into a Unity scene)

The end result of all these massive changes is we're finally gonna be able to have a game that scales resolution to any screen correctly, has live environments so proper animated and skies will move, and finally the foundation to add some pretty wild stuff for the future. We thank everyone for the support you've given, and we're so happy that you've been contributing to our wild project. Some really wild stuff is gonna be in the build soon and we think you'll be pretty happy to see where we go! Here's a little preview off the new engine room to end this new update on: